Re: [anjuta-devel] autoconf issue, maybe better to create new project backend for AVR plugins (based on a standard makefile)?

[Sébastien Granjoux <seb sfo free fr>]

Hi both,


Le 16/08/2011 10:40, Naba Kumar a écrit :
> Despite that, please note that CFLAGS is treated as environment
> variable. So, someone else setting CFLAGS during make most likely will
> override yours, and therefore could interfere with unrelated flags.

I have plan a way to set environment variables in the configure dialog.


> Makefiles only projects are
> very good for "up and running", but very hard to automatically manage
> higher project structures consistently because of primitive rules
> (i.e. every single person writes makefile projects differently) --
> this is fundamentally the reason why there is no consistent
> portability framework at makefile-only level - and the reason why
> automake exists on top of make.

autotools project are more structured but you can write them in a lots 
of way too and I'm not sure we could support everything.


> The only sensible management is sticking to make rules alone (this is
> how the makefile-only project manager would work) without any
> additional assumptions about the structures (so, no AVR specific
> configure dialog, for example).

Currently, I'm agree to allow custom entries (AVR specific) in the 
configure dialog as a way to add additional argument to configure step 
or to define additional environment variable for all build commands.


> It certainly doesn't prevent creating AVR makefile-only project
> templates later on when we have the makefile-only project manager
> ready - just like you explained. However that's where anjuta's support
> for 'AVR' ends, since you can't anymore reliably manage it further.

The current makefile backend is read only but it's working internally 
like the autotools backend so it's probably not too difficult to allow 
write in it.

I think that using our current approach we will never be able to have a 
simple user interface like we can have on other IDE. Then, we can decide 
that it doesn't matter and target enthusiast beginners those will need a 
minimal understanding of autotools or try to find a solution.

We can create simple project backend as planned by Lucas.
Else we can try to add an additional layer on top of existing project 
backend which are just converting more friendly entries into arguments 
and enviroment variable. It's a bit the direction that we have started 
by adding custom widgets in the configure dialog. Perhaps there are 
other ways.


Regards,

Sébastien